Researchers have found out that large forest fires cause tiny particles to reach the stratosphere. What does this mean for the ozone layer, which is only just recovering – and what for humans?
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Benjamin von Brackel
The bushfires in eastern Australia had only just subsided and had huge charred areas and left behind billions of dead animal bodies, that’s when they began to have an effect even in layers of air a few kilometers above. The fires from June 2019 to March 2020 evaporated large amounts of water and storm clouds had built up, which, fueled by the heat, rose into the stratosphere like a hot air balloon, carrying large amounts of charred material with them. Around a million tons of smoke particles entered the stratosphere in the luggage of the so-called pyrocumulonimbus clouds. There they could last for months – in the more turbulent troposphere below, however, they would have been quickly washed out again.